A House for Alice

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to return to Nigeria, but her children are divided on whether she should stay or go.

Alice’s daughters Melissa, Carol and Adele are in conflict. Their father’s sudden death has left behind a web of secrets and resentments, but can they put their differences aside to grant their mother her wish?

Meanwhile Melissa has never quite let go of a love she lost, and in return her ex-husband Michael, is haunted by the failed perfection of the past.

As Alice’s final decision draws closer, all that is hidden between Melissa and her siblings, and Michael, and his new wife Nicole, rises to the surface…

Review

Evans's writing is...subtle but grounded, lyrical yet accessible. Her characters feel real, their interactions - particularly that tense space where the political and domestic meet - nuanced ― Sunday Times

[An] ambitious tale of a family in contemporary London... [Evans's] wide cast of women are deftly drawn. There's heart and humour in abundance ― The Times

The sheer vitality of Evans's dynamic prose... renders almost hypnotic her constant toggling between the prosaic and the metaphysical. There are some deft set pieces too, dramatising intimacy's most finely nuanced dynamics ― Guardian

A warm but devastating narrative, dealing with the fallout of the Grenfell tragedy... Like any Evans novel, it is unputdownable ― Harper's Bazaar, *Books to Look Out For 2023*

One of our most outstanding writers . . . A House for Alice [is] a stunning multi-generational kaleidoscope of London . . . Evans writes with exceptional profundity and is exemplary at exploring the inner workings of her fictional characters through a prose style so poetic you want to languish in her sentences. ― Bernardine Evaristo, Vogue

A wise, tender novel about family and love that explores the tension between duty and desire and the question of what 'home' really means ― Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane and Love Marriage

I adored it. Her writing is exquisite: every sentence a jewel; every paragraph containing some insight that makes you draw breath with its rightness ― Elizabeth Day, author of How To Fail and Magpie

About the Author

Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has received nominations for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book and the Commonwealth Best First Book awards and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and also received a nomination for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction. Her journalism appears in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times. She lives in London.